Adam Byram is a software developer & team lead in Oak Ridge, TN. These days, he's making our healthcare system better at his day job and working on random fun side projects from mobile apps to meal planning software.

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Making MealMind #6: Holding Pattern

Not a lot has happened in the MealMind world this past week. I’m still using the proof of concept to prepare my grocery shopping list and it’s still working great. I haven’t made any updates, but I have a little list of items to knock out. I’ve been playing with AWS Lambdas using C# with .NET Core 2.1. It actually works really great, so I’m thinking through whether I want to actually build each API call as a Lambda and then wire up an API Gateway in front of it to make it feel RESTful.

Lambdas aren’t anything magical, but I do like the idea of building very focused little functions. Additionally, for a small developer, it should be possible to host the service very cheaply with lambdas since you only pay for the actual time the code is running. It also makes it easy to automatically scale up individual parts of the app as needed. At the moment, there isn’t really a technical reason to do anything other than a normal ASP.NET API, but in theory, a set of lambdas would be more future proof and wouldn’t cost much. The huge downside is managing the deployment of a suite of lambdas. If I have, say, 50 different lambdas, it would be a bit of a bear to publish all of them vs deploying just a single ASP.NET API website.

At this point, I think I’ll just take a couple of weeks to experiment with a couple of different things while tweaking the proof of concept a bit. I don’t want to be stuck in an analysis phase forever, but I’m learning more and more with my proof of concept so waiting a little longer to build the “real” thing won’t hurt. I also want to make sure I build on a foundation that I won’t regret 6 months from now.

Adam Byram is a software developer & team lead in Oak Ridge, TN. These days, he's making our healthcare system better at his day job and working on random fun side projects from mobile apps to meal planning software.